Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The original title: "Ning Wang laid out a new track and quietly brewed a revolution."

Fire prevention, theft prevention and peace prevention.

Every move in today's Ningde era may affect the competitive pattern and future trend of power batteries and even new energy vehicles.

On October 31, Ningde Times announced that it signed a memorandum of understanding on global strategic cooperation with VinFast, a Vietnamese car company, to explore various forms of cooperation in CIIC (Ningde era Integrated Smart chassis) to help VinFast quickly open up the global market.

The so-called CIIC is essentially a highly hyped skateboard chassis in the industry, which combines battery, chassis, wire control and non-load-bearing body structure, which is equivalent to the subsequent evolution of CTC chassis battery integration.

In other words, Ningde era is no longer satisfied with just supplying power batteries to car companies, but to explore the possibility of skateboard chassis cars with VinFast.

In mid-October, Ningde Times announced a vehicle manufacturing patent related to CTC (Cell to Chassis) technology, entitled "chassis, vehicle, vehicle preparation equipment and vehicle preparation method", which is scheduled to be launched before 2025.

The biggest highlight of this patent is the use of a retractable chassis design. According to the patent application, "according to the patent application data," this application can replace different lengths of car bodies on the chassis to meet the driving needs and improve the user experience. "

This series of actions in the Ningde era began to trigger numerous speculation in the industry, some people think that the Ningde era is aimed at intervening in the car-building process and seizing the voice of car companies. Because for the whole car factory, the automobile chassis is the life door of the car, and it is the core technology that every whole vehicle factory wants to grasp firmly in their own hands.

As a new favorite of the industry, skateboard chassis was once regarded as the winning password for car companies to catch up with and surpass Tesla. Around this phenomenon, this paper mainly tries to answer three questions:

1. What on earth is the skateboard chassis of Ningde era?

2. Whose life is the skateboard chassis going to change?

3. Can the skateboard chassis run?

The definition of intelligent chassis by "Old Father" and the explanation of "Technical Roadmap of Intelligent chassis for Electric vehicles" are as follows: to provide a delivery platform for autopilot system, cockpit system and power system, with the ability to recognize, predict and control the interaction between the vehicle and the ground, to manage its own running state, and to realize the intelligent driving task of the vehicle, it is not a simple executive agency.

In short, the skateboard chassis is to integrate the electric car's motors, battery packs, and all traditional components into a chassis that looks like a skateboard as much as possible.

But the hot skateboard chassis is not a new species.

As early as 10 years ago, when Musk was working on the electronic payment Paypal, GM unveiled a concept car called the Autonomy at the North American Auto Show, which is widely regarded as the ancestor of the skateboard chassis. Its biggest feature is that the car body can be separated from the chassis and replaced independently.

To use an inappropriate analogy, it is like a four-wheel drive. Even without the shell, the chassis can still run on its own.

Unfortunately, it was born at the wrong time.

In an era when internal combustion engines were absolutely mainstream, this revolutionary concept seemed too avant-garde and out of reach at that time. Then, as GM broke out in the financial crisis and was on the verge of bankruptcy, the technology declined.

Until the engineer of AUTOnomy joined Tesla, who was still a younger brother at that time, with the unfinished dream of skateboard chassis. They have carried out a lot of practice on the concept of skateboard chassis and improved the adaptability of electrification. The well-known Model S has partially adopted the skateboard chassis design, but unfortunately it has not been developed separately on the upper and lower car body, and a large number of driving parts are still bound to the car body.

In 2010, in order to create a real skateboard chassis, some engineers left again and joined Rivian, a new force of car building in Silicon Valley, hoping to develop skateboard chassis technology more purely and realize the separation of upper and lower cars.

After coming to Rivian, they have more say as they wish and developed the first practical skateboard chassis. Its pure electric pickup truck R1T and pure electric SUV R1S based on skateboard chassis technology have become the focus of the automobile circle as soon as they are on the market.

R1T and R1S implement the concept of skateboard chassis, battery, motor, electric control and steering mechanism are all integrated in the chassis, and the two cars can share 91% of the parts. What is this concept? Even twins such as model 3 and model y share only 75 per cent of their parts.

After the rise of Rivian, skateboard chassis became popular overnight, and companies such as Arrival, Canoo and REE announced the development of skateboard chassis one after another.

Among them, Canoo is more radical and has designed a more extreme Lifestyle Vehicle than the R1 brothers. This car is like a moving glass house, and all the space on the chassis can be used.

In 2018, Canoo set up an R & D center in China, which brought the concept of skateboard chassis to China.

The domestic skateboarding chassis track also began to heat up, and the list of players who entered the game continued to expand, with the emergence of leisurely running, PIX, Box Zhixing and so on.

Of all the players, only two startups, Rivian and Canoo, have chosen to cut into the C-end market of the whole car. On the contrary, most domestic start-ups focus on the B-end market, PIX aims at self-driving logistics cars in a semi-enclosed environment, and leisurely positioning tier0.5 released two products, "UP Super chassis" and "UP SPACE Super Cabin" at the beginning of this year. Although they started later than foreign players, they have launched products one after another and are speeding up mass production.

The greatest significance of the evolutionary version of the CTC skateboard chassis is to realize the decoupling between the body and the chassis. With a skateboard chassis, building a car is as simple and efficient as building blocks. We can also think of it as the ultimate evolutionary version of CTC technology.

In the traditional pure electric vehicle manufacturing, the body, battery pack and chassis are separate. On the other hand, the CTC puts these together to release more interior space and weight, which is conducive to the promotion and endurance of the car. This integrated design also saves the spare parts in production and speeds up the production speed, so as to achieve a bumper harvest of low cost and high profit.

At present, CTC technology is gradually becoming the mainstream of the market. Tesla Model Y, BYD Seal and Zero run C01 will take the lead in mass production in the industry with their own CTC technology. In addition, Volvo, Volkswagen, Ford and LG New Energy and other manufacturers are also in the field.

The reason why the skateboard chassis is the evolutionary version of CTC is that the skateboard chassis not only integrates the vehicle's battery and chassis, but also cancels the traditional mechanical system and uses wire control technology to realize the complete separation and decoupling of the body and the chassis. In other words, the skateboard chassis itself can independently complete driving operations such as driving, steering, braking and so on, and unmanned driving can be realized in the future.

Overall, the skateboard chassis has three major advantages:

1. The core control module of the whole vehicle is integrated on the chassis, and the whole vehicle is controlled on the whole line.

2, the model with skateboard chassis can be car, MPV, SUV, pickup, etc., the body can be changed at will, the chassis only needs fine-tuning, or even does not need to be adjusted.

3. Shorten the development cycle of car models, and car companies using skateboard chassis no longer need to spend energy and resources on chassis design.

At the media communication meeting of the China Electric vehicle Association of 100 people in 2021, Ouyang Minggao, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and automobile power system expert, is also very optimistic about the development of skateboard chassis and believes that it will bring a revolution to automobile design and manufacturing.

And with the in-depth reform of the "new four modernizations" of the automobile industry, the momentum of electrification and intelligence is mighty, but there has been no landmark breakthrough in sharing. If skateboard chassis technology can really hit the ground, it is hoped that the auto industry will take a key step in sharing.

As a result, many media have compared the skateboard chassis to Android in the automotive industry. The skateboard chassis provides a shareable way to develop the chassis, which can significantly reduce the development costs of start-ups and reduce the industry's need to repeat wheels on the chassis. Just like a mobile phone manufacturer can develop its own UI based on Android without having to build a system from scratch.

Nowadays, with the development of the integration of battery and chassis to intelligent skateboard chassis, it may reshape the dominant position of the automobile supply chain and break the upstream player pattern of the existing profit chain.

Speaking of which, it is not difficult to understand why the Ningde era changed from building batteries to building chassis. As the number one player in the battery field, Ningde era has a great advantage in the research and development of skateboard chassis. If it takes this piece off, it can control the entire upstream pricing power even if it does not build a car, and control the life and death power of car companies.

Let the bullets fly for a while, where there is undivided land, there will be soldiers fighting for territory with weapons.

The output value of the automobile industry is trillions every year, and once there is a wave of change in smart electric power, commercial energy should not be underestimated. Whether it is battery companies, new forces in car construction, or new cross-border players are interested in laying out this new technology. Are looking for Android opportunities in it.

The ideal is full, but if the skateboard chassis is to really become the mainstream of automobile development, there are still three major technical problems to be solved:

1. The key technology-- wire control technology is not completely mature. Wire control chassis technology mainly includes five major systems: wire control steering, wire control drive, wire control shift, wire control braking, wire control suspension and so on. At present, the EHB drive and shift basically enter the mature stage, the EHB / EMB and the suspension are in the growing stage, and the steering by wire enters the introduction period (SBW).

At present, most of the skateboard chassis in the market are used in semi-closed and low-speed scenes, but for high-speed environments, especially in the field of passenger cars, high-order autopilot must be directly controlled by algorithms in the future, and SBW is an unavoidable technical path.

2. The applicability of hub motors is low. Academician Ouyang Minggao pointed out that distributed drives are now widely used to make skateboard chassis, such as dual motors and triple motors. But the ultimate subversion is the use of hub motors, which will bring more revolutionary changes to the automatic steering of the entire chassis.

However, now the hub motor also faces a series of problems, such as not easy to dissipate heat, high noise, short service life, differential algorithm and so on, so the hub motor is mainly used in the field of medium and low speed.

3. The wheelbase can not be adjusted and fixed, which means that the car company can only transform the upper car body, which is a major weakness of the skateboard chassis. For the passenger car market based on grade, the difference of wheelbase is the basis of market grade and classification. If you can't adjust it, you can only use multiple skateboard chassis.

Despite the difficulties faced in technology development, there is still a big controversy about the skateboard chassis: who will pay for the skateboard chassis?

For the traditional mainframe factory with large production and marketing scale, the chassis is still the core technology and the barrier to competition. They are unlikely to hand over the chassis to a third party, and it will be difficult for car companies to create differentiated products if they outsource the chassis technology to a third party.

Therefore, for startups that make skateboard chassis, if they want to cut into the new energy vehicle track, compared with the passenger car market, it is a high-quality choice to focus on commercial vehicles. For example, Yi Ka Zhi car, has formed a distribution, retail, security patrol, cleaning four scene system. PIX Moving, for example, has also reached an exclusive strategic cooperation with Fulongma Group, and the jointly developed unmanned cleaning robot has been completed and is in the stage of mass production. In this mode, they pay more attention to function, cost, durability, etc., and pay less attention to differentiation, which is conducive to the generalization of the chassis.

Or focus on some new forces that lack funds and lack of car-building experience, as well as car companies with weak chassis technology, who are more concerned about how to launch mass-produced models quickly than mastering the core technology such as chassis.

It is believed that with the continuous progress of self-driving technology, when L4-L5-class self-driving vehicles are popular in time, cars will gradually evolve into a "third living space", when the skateboard chassis will usher in a wider space.

If you want to see the end of the skateboard chassis, you might as well let the bullet fly for a while.

In the end, there is such a view in the core values of Huawei: "almost 100% of the companies do not die because of the lack of advanced technology, but that the technology is so advanced that others have not fully recognized and recognized it, so that no one comes to buy it. Products can not be sold but consume a lot of manpower, material and financial resources, and lose their competitiveness. Huawei wants to keep ahead of its technology, but it can only be half a step ahead of its competitors, and it will become a martyr if it is three steps ahead. "

In this era of intelligence, networking and sharing, the skateboard chassis has once again been pushed to the forefront of the wind and waves. It's just that the life of these skateboard chassis companies is not as good as we thought. Take the aforementioned Rivian, the new power that set the record for the sixth-largest IPO in US history, with a market capitalization of more than $140 billion at one point, but its shares have tumbled more than 70 per cent this year.

However, Rivian's plight is not enough to predict the future of the skateboard chassis. Like all new technologies, the future of the skateboard chassis is destined to be smooth, and betting on this technical route is a big bet. Perhaps, whoever wins the bet will be able to stand in position C.

[full text reference]

[1] "Ningde era and VinFast reach global strategic cooperation to jointly promote global electrification transformation", CATL Ningde era

[2] General Motors' Independent Magic (AUTOnomy) concept car makes an epoch-making debut ", Sina Automobile, 2022.12.31

[3] "A brief Analysis of CTP Technology in Ningde era", Zhu Yulong, Zhihu

[4] "if you understand the CTC, you will understand the market capitalization of the Ningde era." Lu Ming Finance and Economics, Luo Jing

[5] "A series of studies on China's new energy vehicle industry in 2022: what will change from CTC to skateboard chassis? ", head Leopard researcher, Zhao Bin

[6] "cars can be built in 4 billion. Is the era of" low threshold "for new cars coming? Geek Park, Zhou Yongliang

[7] "leisurely running's understanding of skateboard chassis", leisurely Technology, Natalie

[8] "Electric vehicle weight loss Trilogy", Yuanchuan Research Institute

[9] the radical idea of "skateboard chassis" 20 years ago is finally coming true! ", AutoLab, Ni Haifeng

[10] "Academician Ouyang Minggao: hub motor will become a subversive technology to transform skateboard chassis"

[11] "will the skateboard chassis spark the technology of the next generation of new energy vehicles? "China Automobile News, Zhao Linlin

[12] "the skateboard chassis stands on the electric vehicle position C", Banning Studio

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: che Bai think Tank (ID:EV100_Plus). Author: Zhou Shuangjiang.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.